Secretary Kerry Travels Abroad

He’s making it look like the period in which the revolutions in Syria and Egypt will still be self-determining is coming to an end.

In Egypt at any rate. There he sits down with Morsi and the big bourgeoisie, putting the revolution face to face with the counter-revolution. He tells them to patch things up with the International Monetary Fund. It’s good advice.

Then he sits down with some of the representatives of the opposition within the revolution (they are still too fractured all to agree to attend) and tells them, I imagine, that he had already told Morsi to safeguard the rights of women, religious minorities, etc. And maybe those who did attend will be satisfied with that.

Thus Secretary Kerry’s vision for Egyptian unity: sitting down with the parties and making suggestions backed by a relatively few American bucks…as if the revolution had never occurred and was not occurring and they were not, dialectically speaking, mortal enemies.

So it goes when a historically decisive entity decides it would like to impose its will on the self-determinations of a revolution taking place within an entity of the same order, but not the same magnitude. Moreover, as the representative of national capitals, the IMF is a dialectical entity of a different order, but also of great magnitude. It’s a powerful external combination for ending the revolutionary period in Egypt.

In Syria, a decisive act ending the bloody course of self-determination the parties are currently pursuing would be welcome. At least Secretary Kerry is avoiding the Cold War spectacle of two proxy armies, one wielding Russian weapons, the other American, at war with each other while their suppliers watch. I’ve already argued that not arming the Free Syrian Army was a fearful, self-absorbed mistake. At this point, Bashar’s fall would not come years or months from now, but weeks – even if the Russians and Iranians continue to resupply him with ordinance – were the FSA suitably armed. How many Syrians die in a week? in a month? Are their actual victims less precious than the merely putative victims of merely putative terrorism? How many Syrian lives would the Secretary like to throw into this balance?

Because frankly, Al Qaida has no intercontinental reach anymore that I can detect. Maybe the government can detect it. To me, it consists of warlords leading armed gangs, in deserts rather than streets, that hide their bullying and theft behind the mask of a stern religion that ignores several millennia of human progress. And the only people they have killed lately, contrary to their original principles, are mostly Muslims.

Anyway, to paraphrase Churchill, at least it’s a policy, even if it’s wrong. That’s better than the previous Secretary seems to have done. As a policy, it might even lead somewhere.

War Correspondents and Other Misnomers

Journalists who know as little about the science of war as those who have been reporting on the Syrian civil war today would likely never have been able to keep a job during World War II. Their ignorance would quickly have been exposed by their peers and their access to reliable sources would equally quickly have dried up. Such individuals apparently do not belong on this “beat.” Almost every report I read on the military events in Syria makes at least one more or less blatant error of this kind. I’ll give two examples in this post.

Just last week, for one example, in a report that the Taftanaz helicopter base had been taken by the opposition, a reporter expressed doubt whether it could be held because the regime continues to make air strikes on rebel positions. I suppose if the pilot of one such plane were to land and raise Bashar’s flag, he could retake the base for the regime. But no! only ground troops can take military possession of places on the ground. Possession of the air above any such space lasts only as long as aircraft are in flight there. It does not extend to the ground below. The notion of air superiority applies only to the conflict of air forces.

The Kosovo war might be considered a counterexample, but it is out of scope here for me fully to explain why it is not.

The other mistake is the repeated denomination of the war as a “stalemate.” It’s not blitzkrieg, but it’s not a stalemate ether. When all the successes are being recorded by one side, all the initiative is on one side, all the striking power is on one side, it’s not a stalemate.

Note that air strikes do not count as “striking power” for the reason explained in example #1. The fact is, the regime has so little striking power on the ground it cannot keep the roads to its garrisons open. That’s why they have had to be supplied by helicopter. But not anymore. Further, if Bashar still had an armored formation capable of taking the initiative, much less carrying out an offensive, even the journalists would have noticed by now. My guess is, whatever he’s got left is being reserved for the gotterdammerung in the capital – and not out of considerations of state, but rather personal ones.

That’s another story. Anyway, these are the two most frequent gaffes of reporters who have no real background or experience to cover a war. Maybe they suffer from not being “embedded.”

Another source of anxious handwringing, and not just among journalists, is the success in battle of the al Qaida-affiliated al Nusra Front. Two observations: one, they’re Muslims killing Muslims. Bin Laden would not approve. Two, they’re not afraid to die. That’s part of the jihadist mentality. The concentration of fire in this war is not, on either side, to all appearances very great. A little bravery goes a long way in Syria if you’re not afraid to expose yourself.

To be sure, they’re auxiliaries fighting for reasons of their own, the way auxiliaries do. But it’s hard to say whether their reasons are ideological or not, or if they are, what that ideology might be. Cyberspace is crowded with inconsistent assertions. We’ve already seen that their actions don’t align with Bin Laden’s vision for al Qaida. If they wanted to restore the Caliphate, wouldn’t they fight for Bashar? That’s his politics, but his economics are consumer, even luxury, oriented. Instead they’ve chosen the side of the freedom fighters, fighters for civil and political rights. Don’t they know that’s a tough atmosphere for al Qaida? That’s what it became in democratic Iraq. That’s the tendency in any country that has a real economy and a real petit bourgeoisie. The list of al Qaida’s temporary successes is limited to places where tribal, and not bourgeois, politics are predominant.

Maybe they just want to participate in violence. If so, that’s what they’ll do in Syria after the civil war, until they’re driven out of Syria too. The middle class is plenty strong there, and was once a bulwark of the regime, until Bashar drove them from his side by his excesses. If they stay and fight, there will be plenty of handwringing about the Muslims they kill during that process too.

For now, they’re an extremely tough, high-morale formation well able to confront and defeat Bashar’s Alawite units. Maybe it’s too bad is it considered risky for the West to arm them properly. But maybe they have been arming themselves.

The Revolution is Over…

…or it might as well be. I wonder what the people of Yemen will have gotten for their trouble.

The dialectical analysis of an historical entity fails when a larger such entity intervenes, to some degree removing its possibility of self-determination. The smaller entity is no longer free to work out its own contradictions – among other things redoubling the difficulty of dialectical analysis. Now any movement for changes in the state is or may be at the instance, or subject to the approval, of the larger entity and its interests. It’s not a new pattern. What usually happens when the United States, or any other such power, feel they have something to fear about, or gain from, the goings on in a sovereign, independent nation?

So when I posted that the revolution in Yemen was in a dangerous place, the devolution into tribal, prerevolutionary conflict was one danger. The result is worse still, because the first success of that phase was won by al Qaida, when forces under their influence gained control of some provincial capital in the south.

Since then, the U.S. has been exploring the resumption of military aid to the regime, which, apart from procuring the absence of Saleh, gives no appearance whatever of having a revolutionary agenda. It’s too busy struggling with al Qaida, and the tribes who think al Qaida represents their interests – though, to be sure, not their economic interests.

Next, the regime managed to drive al Qaida out of some of the positions they had captured. But at a philosophical distance, the action resembles nothing more than the historical norm of tribal conflict.

So the internal forces are pushing the country backward, and so is the external force majeure being applied by the U.S. To an extent, Yemen still is self-determining, but in a movement that is fundamentally counter-revolutionary. At the end of this movement lies another strongman – at least one strong enough to alternately conciliate and cow the tribes, if not to make himself universally feared.

The revolution in Libya is not in much better condition, though the retrograde movement has not been so rapid. Things seem to have stabilized at a point short of more or less continuous armed conflict. There are reasons to think someone with strong political, nationalist instincts could still overcome a provincialism that cannot be in the interest of the Libyan people as a whole.

In a Dangerous Place

Libya is in a dangerous place. Some countries seem too need a strong man who is strong enough to keep them from flying apart from the outside in. That situation has been reached by the revolutionary militias and their rivals, which are local, in some cases tribal, and in the worst cases, still loyal to the family of the despot.

At least Libya has oil. Oil grounds the possibilities of the middle class, which in turn grounds the possibilities for political and civil liberties in Libya.

This much can’t be said for Yemen. It was chosen by al Qaida for the same reason they choose all their other bolt holes (Iraq excepted, but Iraq was a mistake): it has little or no economic life. Tribal and regional rivalries antedate the Saleh regime – by centuries, even millennia. They drove the very course of the revolution. Saleh’s mastery of those relations was the prime reason he was so difficult to oust.

Worse still, with Saleh gone, what does the revolution do next? Is there anything on its agenda, the demand for which is strong enough to overcome the tendency to relapse into conflicts based on ancient rivalries? The people still carry rifles so they can protect their water holes from rival bands and tribes. Even if the revolution could coalesce around principles and programs, would it be able to govern until they were achieved?

All of which just goes to show that the departure of the despot in normally closer to the beginning than the end of a revolution – particularly a successful one.

So long, Saleh!

Seemingly, the tribes woke up and found they were strong – strong enough to strike a mortal blow, not as chance would have it to Saleh personally, but to his physical ability to maintain his regime. With Saleh in a Saudi hospital, is there anyone left to carry on the civil war in his name? That seems doubtful. The Vice President says he will, but I suppose he’s got a job and would like to keep it.

Power that is built on the weakness of and divisions between one’s enemies rather than the strength of one’s support tends to evaporate in one’s absence.

That leaves the tribes face-to-face with the students and their allies in the capital. We’ll see if they can find common revolutionary ground.

Of course, U.S. insistence on hunting down al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula would tend to resolve this conundrum in favor of another, new strongman in Yemen, someone capable of carrying on the hunt. The choice is between our fears for ourselves, and the bare possibility, slim in itself but scarcely able to resist outside pressure, that the revolution in Yemen might actually be able to gain something for the political and civil liberty of its people.

In the past, confronted with a similar choice, we’ve taken counsel of our fears – more than once in Vietnam, for example.